By Richard D. Erlich

Before the Taliban take over more of Afghanistan and set their sights on Pakistan and its nuclear arms, before Mexico becomes an open battleground for the drug trade in the United States, before the State of California is nudged further toward bankruptcy because we can't afford room and board for a huge prison population, and before another generation of American young men of color find themselves more likely in prison than a university--before things get even worse, can we Americans finally have an adult conversation about drugs and drug policy?

Such a conversation might begin with a story I heard from a cop who had brought a truant schoolchild home to her mother. The girl had missed a lot of school because she was often drunk. The mother's reaction: "Well, at least she's not on drugs!"

The cop resisted the temptation to shake the mother and scream at her that her little girl was an alcoholic; the girl was on drugs and a drug addict: by any honest definitions of "drug" and "addict."

Honesty is a good place to start: alcohol is a drug, and so are nicotine, caffeine, Viagra, aspirin, antibiotics, and anabolic steroids.

Once in a literature class we needed a formal definition of "drug," and a student said a drug was a substance, often manipulated by people, that has a psychological and/or physiological effect when introduced into the body. I noted that such a definition would include even white sugar; the student replied only, "Well?"

He had a point. In Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1, there's a reference to a "poor pennyworth of sugar-candy" that's both a snack and a drug to make one "long-winded" (3.3). In Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, Sidney W. Mintz has sugar as a "food-drug." And seeing sugar as a drug as well as food is useful for seeing how important drug production has been in the history of the Americas and for how long there's been an intimate connection among drugs, the state, and organized crime.

Sugar and molasses, and the sugar-product rum--along with tobacco--were crucial parts of the triangular commerce that had as its most notorious portion the trade in slaves from West Africa.

Many Americans were in the drug business from our beginning, and, by historical standards, the narco-crime lords of today are small-time hoods when put against evil on the scale of the slave-trade.

So we've got a culture heavily into drugs, a culture that has known sin, and we're going to have to deal with that--but we can deal with it.

A student who'd become a drug counselor asked me if I remembered the fears of a heroin epidemic when US troops came home from Vietnam. We had a fair number of soldiers who used heroin in 'Nam, and we'd been warned that many would bring their habit home.

There was no epidemic.

Heroin use was fairly common among troops in Vietnam because pain was common. The great majority of apparently addicted soldiers left their pain in Vietnam and with it their more powerful painkillers. If they came home to a decent neighborhood and a decent life, they left their drug as easily as people leave even more powerful painkillers when they leave the hospital. If the ex-soldiers came home to pain, in areas where heroin was easily available, then there was a good chance they'd go back on heroin.

As my ex-student taught me, it's never "The Addict" and "The Drug"--abstractions worse than useless--but real-world addicts with different metabolisms in complex social contexts interacting with a wide range of drugs.

With an honest definition of "drugs," we can look at history and sociology, and then take two important steps to deal with America's drug problems. First, we should lump drugs together and consider the role(s) of drugs in our society from aspirin to heroin to alcohol to antibiotics; and then we must very carefully distinguish among drugs and their uses and abuses.

Graham Nash notwithstanding, we cannot really "change the world-- /
Re-arrange the world"; but we can stop lying to ourselves about "A Drug-Free America" and get on with what can be done to minimize harm from drugs and maximize their usefulness.

In an earlier time of economic distress--and none too soon--America gave up on the capital "P" Prohibition of beverage alcohol; we can be equally smart about easing or eliminating many of our current prohibitions, however much Americans hate to quit, even when we're quitting banging our heads into walls.

We can, though (maybe) be smarter than the Americans who ended alcohol Prohibition. If we deal with psychoactive drugs as a group, within a broader consideration of drug use generally, I think we'll conclude that we can more than make up for any problems with legalizing drugs like marijuana and heroin if we forbid their advertising and marketing and apply similar prohibitions to alcohol and nicotine products. As funny as the Cheech and Chong routine is, it would be bad to have commercials touting, "Acapulco Gold Is Bad-Ass Weed"; even so, it's probably a bad idea to have great commercials and attractive packaging for alcohol products.

To update a point from John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" (1859), a product can be legal, but pushing the product can be strongly regulated.

Beer and wine will have to remain widely available, but anything stronger can go into clean and safe, but definitely stodgy "Drug Stores" where the single malt scotch can sit next to liquid THC--smoking marijuana should be discouraged--in plain black-on-white packages telling adult customers, as honestly as bureaucrats can, what the drug will do for them, and what it might do to them.

That's one possible outcome, one you might not like, especially if your drug-of-choice is fancy scotch. I won't press the point. What I will press is that we have to move now to serious discussion.

We cannot afford narco-terrorists winning in Afghanistan or in Mexico. We literally can't afford to maintain a large and aging prison population. And we never could afford the dishonesty, nor the class, race, ethnicity, and generational conflict at the corrupt heart of "The War on Drugs."

It's not a war with drugs; it's a set of social issues, including problems in public health. Let's quit the war and get to work on the problems.

Richard D. Erlich is an emeritus professor, Miami University (Oxford, OH), who retired to Port Hueneme, CA.

Posted by Mark at 1:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

SPOILERS AHEAD!

Watchmen is about as complex as a tale of morality can get. Ethics are ambiguous, and the story isn't told just on a single scale, but on a scale that ranges from the life of a single individual to the lives of everyone on Earth.

Every character, to some degree, is disgusted by the depravity of human nature. Rorschach manifests his disgust as something of an alternate personality that seeks to dispense ultimate justice. The Comedian similarly understands human depravity, and his "joke" is that he chooses to ignore it and instead become a caricature of that depravity. Perhaps he thinks that his masquerade will make him immune to the horrors that people foist upon each other - and, indeed, that the Comedian eventually visits on plenty of other people. But toward what will soon be the end of his life, he realizes that the joke was on him: the universe doesn't care if he was being ironic or not. All that matters is himself, and he is driven to tears by the understanding that he was not a good person. Dr. Manhattan is disgusted not by the actions of mankind, but by its triviality. Since Dr. Manhattan can see and do things that ordinary humans can only dream of ("I have walked on the surface of the sun," he tells Ozymandias), the human race is a speck to him, no more important than a similar amount of dust. His attitude toward people is one of detached amusement; human depravity is interesting as an academic study, but that's it.

These "superheroes" hold the fate of mankind in their hands. One of Watchmen's big questions is whether or not we should entrust such power to mere mortals. Nietzsche's superman (or, more correctly, over-man) is apropos here, not the least because this is a story of supermen and women. The boundary between superhero and supervillain is often represented as a difference of vision. The superhero tries to create an altruistic utopia (one of the very, very few things that Joel Schumacher's abominable Batman and Robin gives us is this line from Alfred which sums up the mission of all superheroes: "For what is Batman if not an effort to master the chaos that sweeps our world? An attempt to control death itself"). The supervillain seeks narcissistic tyranny, attempting to re-make the world in his own image, or to destroy mankind, or to engage in a selfish, ignoble endeavor that will kill lots of people. Perhaps this is what made the original comic book so groundbreaking: in Watchmen, there are really no supervillains. Superheroes are trying for an altruistic utopia, but going about it in ways that remind us of supervillains. The literary critic Northrup Frye said that mythological stories were about protagonists who were greater than us both in kind and degree (meaning they are physically better human beings than we are, and morally better, as well). Watchmen is a mythological story about protagonists who are, for the most part, the same as us in kind (with the exception of Dr. Manhattan), but all of whom are the same as us in degree.

Watchmen returns us to the origin of the superhero, the over-man who is permitted to break society's rules (1) because he is morally superior to normal men (meaning he will not abuse the power he is given) and (2) because society's rules hinder his ability to create that altruistic utopia. To simplify, "you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs." Of course, when the eggs are human lives, that's where the issue of morality comes into play. It gets murkier once we discover that "supermen" are men; that is, human beings who are no more morally upstanding than anyone else. Even Dr. Manhattan, the only true superhero in that he is the only person with extra-natural powers, has his understanding of humanity limited by his apathy toward it. There are times when amorality is just as immoral as immorality. (When The Comedian shoots a Vietnamese woman, the mother of his child, in Vietnam, he rightly chastises Dr. Manhattan for not doing something to stop it, given that Dr. Manhattan can see the future and manipulate matter.) Is it is for this reason that one of the taglines of the film and comic book - "Who watches the watchmen?" - is so poignant. In the real world, why would we entrust our safety to a bunch of people who are accountable to no one but each other (and even then, they can't really stop each other from doing evil)? Comic books readily accept that entire cities or even nations surrender their security to vigilantes, without oversight. Though it was not intended as a criticism of the Bush administration, the situation is similar: don't trust your safety to someone whose idea of oversight is "Trust me." Given what Watchmen shows us about humanity, there's no reason we should trust anyone, even people who claim to have our best interests in mind. There is something inherently contradictory in the existence of a person who breaks the law so that he can enforce it. We like the superhero who enforces the law; we dislike the superhero who breaks it. Nevertheless, we knew the entire time that the superhero was operating outside the law, and that he could change his mind on a whim. A benevolent dictator is still a dictator nonetheless.

Morality is ambiguous because humans are flawed. In Watchmen, there are no fewer than three concurrent stories of morality. One is the overarching story of potential nuclear war and Ozymandias' attempt to stop it. A second is the rape (or not?) of the original Silk Spectre by the Comedian, resulting in the birth of Sally Jupiter. The third example is to be found only in the graphic novel. "Tales of the Black Freighter" is a story within the story, a pulp comic book that this week is spinning a tale of a shipwrecked man's desperate attempts to get back home before the pirates who shipwrecked him do. If you're familiar with "Appointment in Samarra," then you will be familiar with "Tales of the Black Freighter." In this last story of morality, the ends most vehemently do not justify the means. "Black Freighter" is about what happens when a man thinks he is a superman, but does everything wrong.

The antithesis of any superhero comic is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, in which a Nietzschean superman, Mr. Kurtz, goes crazy and becomes a tyrant in the darkest part of Africa. (If this all sounds familiar, it's because Apocalypse Now is based on Heart of Darkness.) Kurtz could have used his considerable power for good, but being that he was a human being, there was always a fifty-fifty chance that he would have used them for evil. If Anne Frank's motto was, "In spite of everything, I still believe that people are good at heart," Kurtz's motto was, "The horror! The horror!" Watchmen falls somewhere between Anne Frank's naïveté and Kurtz's desperation. Where Kurtz thought that loathing was the only solution for a doomed world inhabited by flawed people, Watchmen acknowledges that, as a population, people are generally good, but they must sometimes be goaded - or even forced - into that goodness.

After almost three hours, Watchmen - exactly like its source material - leaves us with an icky feeling. Audiences are used to stories in which there is a clear hero and a clear villain. Watchmen instead presents us with characters who are morally ambiguous, as all of us are. On the one hand, Ozymandias has succeeded in creating world peace. On the other hand, fifteen million people had to do die in order to get that peace. Do the ends justify the means? Can a Good outcome be derived from Evil actions? Alan Moore would have us think so.

In the abstract, Truth is Beauty by nature of it being Truth. But it can come in an ugly, and even inhibiting, form. At the end of Heart of Darkness, Marlow meets with Kurtz's widow back in the safety of London civilization. She asks Marlow what Kurtz's last words were. Marlow knows what they were - Kurtz's lament toward a self-destructive and hopeless species - but he lies, instead. Marlow tells her that his last word was her name. The end of the similarly morally-ambiguous The Dark Knight presents us with the same lie: that Harvey Dent was not Two-Face and did not kill a lot of people. Watchmen offers us a third lie: that Dr. Manhattan, not Ozymandias, killed fifteen million people. All three of these lies are ugly by virtue of their not being the truth. And yet, here in The Real World, far from philosophical abstraction (where Dr. Manhattan lives, incidentally), the truth would have taken a far uglier toll.

Perhaps fiction is so littered with Manichean stories of absolute good and absolute evil because we understand, deep down, that no such things exist. We don't want to read and watch stories of people who are like us; we want stories of people who are better than us, people who strive for ideals without compromise. Rorschach refuses to compromise and is vaporized for his trouble. He was unwilling or unable to admit that idealism, in the sense of implementing ideals without compromise, is not possible in a world filled with flawed beings. We would no more expect justice to be doled out by a robot than we would expect ideals to implemented without compromise. Rorschach is analogous to the Terminator in that he is free of remorse and will absolutely not stop until his mission, to rid the world of evil, is complete. But he ignores the fact that there are kinds and degrees of evil; is a lie that saves five billion people more or less evil as a truth that kills five billion people? It's easy to claim that Truth is Beauty, Beauty Truth when you're reading it on a page. But when the Doomsday Clock is five minutes to midnight, all those aphorisms ring with only futility.

Posted by Mark at 2:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)